Leigh Hoffman

Arguably the world’s fastest team sprint starter, Leigh Hoffman is a vital cog of the Australian Cycling Team team sprint unit.

Hoffman was in Year 10 at Samaritan College in Whyalla, in rural South Australia, when a conversation with Olympic gold medallist Brett Aitken put him on the path towards an Olympic debut and possibly a medal of his own in Paris.

Leigh and his family had been making the nine-hour round trip to Adelaide every weekend for training when Aitken suggested it was time to make the move permanent.

Brett – who won Madison gold with Scott McGory at the Sydney 2000 Olympics – was coaching Leigh at the South Australian Sports Institute (SASI) and knew he had a serious talent on his hands.

At that point, Hoffman had been riding competitively for four years, having followed his older brother Lucas to the local velodrome, 2km from the family home.

He initially wanted to be a triathlete, but found his speed and power better suited to shorter distances, so track sprinting it was.

State records began tumbling by U17s and in 2019 Hoffman broke through at the national level as an U19, breaking the flying 200m record before Thomas Cornish did the same before winning the sprint national championship.

He was then named to the Australian Cycling Team for the 2019 UCI Junior Track World Championships in Aigle, Switzerland, where he would finish fourth in the sprint and sixth in the keirin.

By 2020, Hoffman was elevated to the AusCycling Podium Potential program and begin to carve out a presence as a world-class starter behind the then incumbent starter, Nathan Hart.

After travelling to the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games as reserve Hoffman really began to make the Australian Cycling Team starting role his own at UCI Track Nations Cups.

In 2022, Hoffman won a gold medal in the team sprint at the 2022 Commonwealth Games in Birmingham.

Later that year at the 2022 UCI Track World Championships in Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines, France, he was an integral part of that quartet who broke a decade-long drought for Australia to become team sprint world champions in Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines, defeating the Netherlands.

In the gold medal final, Hoffman proved just how quick he is by posting a blistering first lap time of 16.949 to Netherlands’ 17.468, and setting up his teammates Richardson and Glaetzer who would go on to win the race in a time of 41.600.  That time is unofficially the fastest ever set in the world by a team sprint starter.

The same team then went on to win silver at the 2023 UCI Cycling World Championships in Glasgow, Scotland, in another nail-biting final with their Dutch rivals.

Leigh travelled to Tokyo with the team for the last Games in 2021, but only as a reserve, an experience he says will serve him well in Paris.

In his downtime away from the track, Leigh fancies himself with a tattoo pen and has a few unique markings.

Like a track sprinter in athletics, a team sprint starter on the velodrome can spend four years training for 16 seconds at an Olympic Games.

Hence Leigh's job is very specific. Get out of the start gate as fast as he can, then produce as much power as possible for one lap to send his teammates into the remaining two laps as fast as he can.

A typical training week involves four gym sessions where they are squatting upwards of 190kg, three track sessions and an ergo session on the stationary bike on weekends.

Hoffman has four team sprint elite national championships to his name with South Australia.

Hoffman made his Olympic debut at Paris 2024, where he helped power Australia to bronze in the men's team sprint.

For the bronze-medal final, Hoffman yielded the starter's position to Glaetzer, and the change yielded success when they, together with Richardson, defeated the home French team to earn Australia's first Olympic medal in the event in 20 years.

Hoffman also competed in the individual sprint, where he was eliminated in the 1/8 final.

Club: Whyalla Cycling Club